Page 307 - madame-bovary

en background behind her, and her bare head was mirrored
in the glass with the white parting in the middle, and the tip
of her ears peeping out from the folds of her hair.
‘But pardon me!’ she said. ‘It is wrong of me. I weary you
with my eternal complaints.’
‘No, never, never!’
‘If you knew,’ she went on, raising to the ceiling her beau-
tiful eyes, in which a tear was trembling, ‘all that I had
dreamed!’
‘And I! Oh, I too have suffered! Often I went out; I went
away. I dragged myself along the quays, seeking distraction
amid the din of the crowd without being able to banish the
heaviness that weighed upon me. In an engraver’s shop on
the boulevard there is an Italian print of one of the Muses.
She is draped in a tunic, and she is looking at the moon,
with forget-me-nots in her flowing hair. Something drove
me there continually; I stayed there hours together.’ Then in
a trembling voice, ‘She resembled you a little.’
Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might not
see the irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips.
‘Often,’ he went on, ‘I wrote you letters that I tore up.’
She did not answer. He continued—
‘I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring you.
I thought I recognised you at street-corners, and I ran after
all the carriages through whose windows I saw a shawl flut-
tering, a veil like yours.’
She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without
interruption. Crossing her arms and bending down her face,
she looked at the rosettes on her slippers, and at intervals

0 Madame Bovary